It looks like Mark Zuckerberg would not have got Facebook going if he’d started it at a British University. The founder of a UK site integrated with Facebook and Twitter allowing students to flirt has been fined £300 for bringing his university into disrepute. FitFinder only started last month but rapidly expanded to universities across the country.

But founder Rich Martell, 21, a final-year computer sciences student at University College London, has been forced to take the site down. UCL said it had been contacted by a number of other universities unhappy about FitFinder. It’s fined Martell £300 under UCL’s “Disciplinary Code of Bringing the College into Disrepute” and told him that failure to pay the fine would put his degree at risk.

As we know from breaking news right now over 10 people have died after Israeli commandos boarded a convoy of ships carrying aid to Gaza, sparking an international controversy. But we’re not going to get into the politics of that situation. What we’re interested in is what happened on Twitter today. Because although the convoy has been dubbed a “flotilla” by Twitter users and a large number of people were using the #flotilla hashtag, this disappeared from after trending briefly. The only remaining related trend topic was Israil, the Turkish word for Israel.

As a result, a large number of of people are calling out Twitter for “censoring” the #flotilla hashtag.

In addition #flotilla was not appearing on Twitter’s trending list despite the fact that it is pretty prominent on Google trends. It’s causing a huge wave of controversy right now.

So what can be found out about what happened to the #flotilla hashtag?

According to a new research report from Sweden-based wireless analyst Berg Insight, mobile location-based service revenues in Europe are forecasted to grow from €220 million in 2009 to €420 million in 2015.

Berg Insight adds that local search, navigation services and social networking are poised to become the top applications in terms of number of users, which is sort of a give-away as those categories have already proven to be the most popular and fastest-growing among smartphone users worldwide.

Berg Insight, which offers business intelligence to the telecom industry and provides analysis to companies such as AT&T, Microsoft, France Telecom, IBM, KPN Mobile, NTT Docomo, Nokia, Telefonica O2, Vodafone Group, Alcatel and Motorola, estimates that one third of all mobile subscribers in Europe will use “some kind of location-enhanced application” on a regular basis by 2015.

At GeeknRolla this year a volcano in Iceland prevented Tommy Ahlers, founder of the Zyb mobile startup, from presenting in person at the event. We tried piping him in over that tried and tested technology known as Skype. Unfortunately it didn’t go off as planned, so Tommy’s excellent presentation was reduced to a bad audio feed. So I was delighted that he could reprise his speech at TechCrunch Nordic in Copenhagen last week.

The thrust of the speech was not about starting up with the aim of exiting your startup. But almost how, in not concentrating on the exit and instead building an awesome company and product you may end up exiting anyway, because you’ll just become attractive to potential suitors.

Tommy Ahlers, founder and CEO of mobile contacts appZyb, which was sold to Vodafone in 2008 for €31.5 million, knows a thing or two about this subject.

Some main points from his speech included:

Apple’s Steve Jobs famously offered us “freedom from porn” in his ongoing war with Adobe Flash on the iPhone and iPad. But notoriously liberal Berlin has a different take on the matter, perhaps offering us freedom from being told what to do by Apple…

Billboards announcing the arrival of the iPad on Friday have been going up all over Berlin, but one of them in the subway station of Rosenthaler Platz is quite different to the rest. As you can see from the images below, the iPad appears to be about to offer an entirely new experience of porn.

The UK has been gripped by the launch of the iPad if the Twitpics are to be believed. As you can see from the below ( thanks jasonlan and joanikin) there was a large crowd queuing outside Apple’s flagship London store on Regent’s Street, in a line which literally snaked around the corner into Hanover Square. Believe me, that is a long line.

Some estimates have put the crowd at around 500 people outside, waiting to grab the iPad.

This is a guest post by Danvers Baillieu, an associate solicitor at Winston & Strawn and co-founder of Bootlaw.

The day before the UK General Election, Techcrunch EU ran this post highlighting the taxation policies of the Liberal Democrat party and suggested that plans to raise capital gains taxes could be damaging for UK based start-ups. Whether or not the disappointing results for the Lib Dems were directly connected to this withering attack is yet to be proven but nevertheless, having the balance of power and entered into coalition with the Conservatives, it would appear that the Lib Dems are to get their way on capital gains tax.

At this point, I should declare an interest as a card carrying member of the Conservative Party and I have been enthusiastically supporting the new coalition through my personal blog. I also happened to comment on the earlier Techcrunch EU post along the lines that the cut in capital gains tax by Labour was not all it was cracked up to be, but on balance was pretty good for the tech sector.

Where is everyone checking in to Foursquare in London? Ok, there’s admittedly an app for that. But here’s a very interesting infographic instead (hat tip via alextroll). Click on the graphic for a bigger image. Thanks to Advertisingaphasia.

We don’t normally post about events here, and there are better resources available for tracking those, like the increasingly handy Startup Digest. But we do make an exception about our own events and those we collaborate and partner with around Europe. To that end European entrepreneurs need to be aware of a major change in the format of the Seedcamp startup programme this year.

Normally Seedcamp takes applications for its main, annual Seedcamp Week from all over Europe. But now Mini Seedcamp London will be the last chance to get a slot for the main week. Applications are open now.

NewVoiceMedia, which offers a cloud-based contact centre solution, has raised £4m in VC funding from Eden Ventures and Notion Capital, the fund established last year by Jos and Ben White, founders of Messagelabs.

NewVoiceMedia says it will use the new investment to further develop its ContactWorld product and take it global.

The company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution claims to offer “sophisticated contact centre technology at a fraction of the cost of traditional models”, opening up call centre functionality to companies of a smaller size for whom it would otherwise be out of reach.

TweetDeck, the popular Adobe Air desktop app for social networks (though an HTML5 version is on the way), has now integrated Foursquare into its latest release. The move represents the latest from the startup to grab the “social dashboard” crown against the likes of Seesmic and others, although Tweetdeck seems to be heading towards a kind of “Pro User” space more than anything else.

Now, adding your Foursquare account into Tweetdeck adds a location column. This has the handy benefit that Foursquare tweets can now be filtered out of your “All Friends” twitter column. A lot of people will probably welcome this as they tend to polute Twitter rather than adding anything to it. Now, the location column has a map button at the bottom. Clicking on this lets you view a live map of friends checking into Foursquare. Tweetdeck plans to extend this map shortly to be available in a separate view on a check-in item in the location column.

Who said Christmas doesn’t come early?

It’s iPad day tomorrow here in the UK, when the device officially launches. But, for those that pre-ordered, it hasn’t stopped delivery vans across the country turning up this morning with Apple’s shiny new toy in hand. And most customers are delighted, of course.

Yes, I said most.

GuardTime, the data integrity service, has raised $8m in a Series A round.

Investment comes from Horizons Ventures; Ambient Sound Investments, the fund formed by the founding engineers of Skype; Infocomm Investments; FITOne Capital, a subsidiary of FIT-One Holdings, an IT startup business incubator in Japan; and Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist.

The company, founded in Estonia but headquartered in Japan, offers a service architecture that “provides independently verifiable proof of data integrity”, which is often a legal requirement on companies and financial organisations.

TechCrunch Nordic – Copenhagen – 26th May 2010
TechCrunch Europe is hosting its 3rd TechCrunch Nordic event – joining the Seedcamp startup programme on their European tour in Copenhagen.

Below you’ll find our live stream from the event which kicks off at 2.30pm Copenhagen time.

Videoplaza, the video ad server startup, has moved swiftly to make its Monetizer AdPlayer product ready for the iPad’s European invasion.

That’s because it now supports HTML5, enabling videos to be monetized on Apple’s tablet. Remember the iPad doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash Video, the current industry-wide standard for delivering online video, so it’s the HTML5 way or the highway as far as Apple is concerned.

And specifically, Monetizer AdPlayer now offers a plug-in for Brightcove, which has already rolled out a HTML5-friendly version targeting the iPad – see the video demo below.

Former Amazon Europe Vice-President, investor and ‘serial entrepreneur’, Simon Murdoch, has joined Octopus Ventures as a Senior Investment Partner.

Octopus Ventures, a division of Octopus Investments Limited (‘Octopus’), specialises in early stage venture capital and growth capital transactions. Murdoch will work alongside Alex Macpherson and his team across the company’s portfolio of investments.

The BBC’s video on demand service, iPlayer is introducing social networking features which should further boost the uptale of Twitter and Facebook in the UK – as if they needed any boosting. The new iPlayer Beta is set to go live officially at the end of June.

Twitter, Facebook and Windows Live Messenger will be linked to a user’s “BBC ID” which they get when they register on BBC.co.uk. Users will be able to share what they’re watching over social networks (queue lots of “Watching Britains Got Talent” updates) while Windows Messenger will show in real-time how many minutes a user is in to a program on iPlayer and allow them to sync viewing with friends and chat about the show in realtime. The features will also work for BBC radio stations.

Spotify‘s Android app sees a major update today, integrating a number of the new social and music player features of the music streaming service that launched last month.

New to the app is the ability to play and wirelessly sync music files stored locally on your PC to your phone; support for Spotify’s “Inbox, Feed and Starred features”; the option to filter for tracks in playlists; and finally Last.fm scrobbling.

We may have had a change of government but it’s roll on Digital Britain.

At least in regards to a new £18m fund designed to “create the next generation of digital businesses” that was announced by the Technology Strategy Board, the UK government’s innovation agency, back in March.

iGlue, which wants to “wikify the web“, has raised a further $550,000 from an unnamed accredited private investor.

The new round effectively doubles in4 Ltd’s funding (the Budapest company behind iGlue), after initial investment from Hungary-based Power of the Dream Ventures (PDV).

This values in4 at over $5.5m, according to Viktor Rozsnyay, CEO of PDV.